College Football Recruiting: New NCAA social media rules take effect

It’s August 1, which means college football is officially underway, and college football coaches throughout the nation have already started taking advantage of the new NCAA social media rules.

College football fans from around the country might have noticed that once the clocks hit midnight on August 1, 2016, recruiting anarchy took place among coaches throughout the NCAA.

But why is that? Because the NCAA’s rules in coaches’ interactions with recruits finally got an update!

This post from Reddit user, Lex_Ludorum was floating around Twitter yesterday, which acted as a reminder to all of college football, to brace itself for the subtle changes.

"New NCAA Social Media Rules Start 8/1 from CFB"

As some might recall, back in April, the NCAA announced the new controversial rules change, which in short, allowed coaches to retweet or favorite recruits’ Tweets, permitting the staff didn’t engage in conversation. According to the Reddit post, rules also specify that a coach who retweets a recruit can comment on the player one minute later.

And by “comment,” a coach can mention measurables or areas where the recruit in discussion carries the greatest strengths, as long as the coach doesn’t mention the player by their Twitter handle. Finally, a staff can retweet players after their official visits, but not during.

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In the past, recruiting experts and analysts handled the majority of social media involvement with recruits, but retweets from coaches themselves tend to bolster excitement within recruits. And while these new rules don’t really do much in terms of opening a potential labyrinth to illegal interaction, they do feed into the “be seen” college football recruiting game.

This might not seem like a big deal to most, but in a way, it’s the recruits’ ways of exploiting fan bases. While fans aren’t allowed to act as agents on behalf of a college or university to lure student-athletes, retweets by coaches could really show a recruit which fanbases are staying current on the recruiting cycle, which is a big draw for them.

The more enthusiasm a fan base exudes, the more excited a student-athlete will be about the culture and program the university is selling, which is a win-win for all parties.

I cover the Big 12 conference, so I saw a lot of activity from Texas Tech, and Texas Christian University coaches, who all seemed to be synchronous with the click ferocity. But ESPN’s Max Olson might have planted the seed for the next round of NCAA recruiting updates:

A recruiting purge? Sounds like the thing of nightmares, but hey, anything is possible!

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The NCAA has been somewhat medieval in their enforcement, and slow to modernize its practices, so while this is just a small step in the right direction, at least it is something. However, if we want to continue to see any degree of progress, we all have to play by the rules, so if anyone has questions about permissible recruiting engagement, please contact your team’s compliance department for clarification.